
Ward moved through the subway
turnstile quickly, swiping his card swiftly, bumping the bar with his
hip to ensure that his suit didn’t get wrinkled. It was a practiced
motion, and one he was not consciously aware of, as this had been his
morning commute for some years now. In fact, he rarely payed
attention to anything he saw on his commute. When he had first come
to the city, he had been happy and awed by it’s beauty, much better
than the podunk town he’d come from. But ordinariness had dulled the
scenery, and now his head was too full of the business for the day to
stop and admire anything. That, and he always rode the edge of being
late. Hurrying along, he took the stairs to cross to the other
platform. But in the tunnel something slipped through the haze and
he stopped.The entire right hand wall of the
tunnel seemed to have been replaced with an ocean view, which had
jolted Ward from his reverie. He realized that it was just a photo
covering the wall, but it looked amazingly real. He wasn’t even sure
if it was a picture and not some 4K screen an advertiser had
installed. He wasn’t sure what it was advertising, but whatever it
was, it made him really want to go to the beach.Ward turned away from the image to
continue on when he noticed the opposite wall was also covered in
another image, this one of the edge of a beach transitioning into a
rich an verdant forest, though something about the forest seemed off
to him. The colors of some of the flowers were strange, and the way
the wind seemed to whisper through the trees was somehow off. Ward
realized suddenly that he could hear the sounds of a forested beach,
and was even more amazed because there were no speakers that he could
see. His mind tried to remind him that he was in a hurry to get
to… somewhere, but his curiosity want to figure this advertisement
out, see how it worked. He just wanted to look at stare at the
pretty image to figure it out so he could relax and go to that beach.Ward looked all around and realized
that even the ceiling and floor were covered in the image, though he
was sure that it hadn’t been that way before. The ceiling was of a
beautiful blue sky crossed with the few forest branches that reached
out to the sea, while the floor just looked like a sandy beach. His
bare feet told him it didn’t feel like sand, just a flat, hard floor,
but his eyes swore that it was a beach. Something about his bare
feet started to bother him, and he tilted his head to the side. He
was supposed to be naked, right? He had been intending to go to the
beach, hadn’t he? This is what you wore to the beach, wasn’t it? He
was sure that was wrong, there was something that he needed to wear,
but for the life of him he couldn’t think of what it was.Ward snapped his fingers as he
remembered. His laurel! How could he have forgotten that? He
reached up to the branches coming from the ceiling and pulled some
leafy fronds from them, which he expertly twisted into a laurel for
his head. He didn’t remember ever learning how to do that, but it
seemed to come naturally. He closed his eyes as he slid the wreath
onto his head, happy that he was finally properly dressed. But when
he opened them, he realized something was still wrong. The forest
that was his home stretched off correctly into the distance, but the
beach he stood on was not a beach, but felt like a flat, bare
surface. Turning, he saw he was standing on some sort of platform,
the image of the sea plastered along its wall. The illusion was
marred however, but the immobility of the waves and the shadows of
himself, the trees, and the scaffolding being cast on it by the
morning sun.Ward put his hand to the wall and
pushed. It fell and showed him the real beautiful ocean. He stepped
off the platform and ran to it, happy to have finally arrived. He
had wanted to go to the beach with his saytr friends for some time
now, to play and sport and finally be made one of their number. But
they had all said he wasn’t ready until this day. He ran up and down
the beach with his human legs on more time as he waited for the
beings that would finally turn him into a perfect denizen of the
forest he loved…



























